The thought of Facebook changes make nearly every user cringe. Happily stuck in our familiar ways, we sometimes fail to see that the changes are often improvements introduced to enhance our eSocializing habits. We’re YPs, non-complacent in life, so why would we accept that a social network should stagnate anymore than we would.
So, what is Timeline?
Unveiled at last month’s f8 conference, the new profile design catalogues and categorizes an entire life’s worth of pictures, videos and events all catered to you. From the moment you joined facebook til now, Timeline organizes each picture, status update and wall post chronologically, allowing for a scrapbook-type profile.
Timeline’s Official Introduction Video
This new function will let you choose and primarily display any highlights of your life that really show off who you are through your interests, activities and accomplishments.
Like that time you went skydiving and made all your friends jealous…
Or, more obviously, it lets that great picture of you that took four tries (it’s awkward to self photograph, no?) to finally get perfect remain visible, and older, less flattering pictures to be pushed back.
C’mon…we’ve all been there.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, described this new feature as now having the ability to express who you are and all the things you do – the music you love, the recipes you enjoy, the runs you take and more.
How Will It Affect Businesses and Marketing?
In a nutshell, it’s going to allow companies to reach potential and existing consumers in ways that have never been available. With this transition from Facebook’s beginnings as a digital ID to its apparent future as a digital autobiography, each user will be a data mine of trends and information for advertisers to learn from.
Users Can Clean Out Virtual ‘Closet’
One of the new features Timeline is introducing is the ability to unmark a story, or essentially express your disinterest in anything being shared by others. Facebook takes this information and edits users news feeds based on it, meaning frequent, irrelevant updates will be removed from the channel and become less visible. 

This will force businesses to maintain interesting, engaging and relevant published work to keep their consumers and following within reach.
How Will This Affect Brands?
Branding, in terms of the new Timeline layout, will let companies tell a more engaging and visually appealing story, and the success or failure of utilizing these new options will affect the way people navigate Facebook and access information in a big way. The new changes demonstrate a radical movement in how people can express themselves in more detail, while maintaining a simplistic, relevant source of information.
This is Coca-Cola’s current Facebook page…
This is how creative director Ryan Kennedy imagines the new page will look with Timeline…
Awesome, right?
More Than Just Friends
Similar to tagging a fellow Tweeter in a Twitter update, branded social content is going to boom with the new means of Timeline, in which a surge of specific status updates will begin, such as “Jane is at Tim Horton’s on Yonge and Bloor and ordered an Iced Capp.” Similarly, this launches an introduction of varying types of actions available to users on Facebook. Meaning, you will now not only be able to ‘Like’ McDonald’s page, but you can also ‘drive thru’, ‘enjoy’, or ‘eat’ McDonald’s. This new verbal addition means the potential for exponential growth in nteractions with brands and businesses per customer. Put simply, with the current Facebook setup, you can only ‘like’ McDonald’s once, but you can ‘eat’ it multiple times a day (although not at all recommended).
This no longer limits companies to only seeing Jodie ‘check in’ at the mall, but allows insight into what she specifically does, which stores she checks out, what she’s looking for, what she can (and can’t) find, and how she feels about it. This customized information is a one-way stream of knowledge directly from the consumer to the company, providing producers with the exact information they need, without even knowing it.
Revolution in Consumer Accessibility
This Facebook redesign puts more pressure on companies to engage directly with their consumers with relevant content in interesting ways, but also pays companies back a much greater return if they do so successfully. So, whether you’re a Facebook-for-lifer bent on discovering how these changes will affect your updates and interactions, or a brand manager looking for the best and brightest method to reach your target audience in a more subversive yet effective way, this is one time we’ll recommend spending some much needed daytime hours navigating, as we like to say so summer-2010-style, the Facebook.
Helpful Links:
Go here to check out other Ryan Kennedy Timeline designs.
Go here to check out and sign up for a beta version of Timeline.
Go here to learn more about branding on Facebook.
Go here to see the entire f8 Timeline release presentation.
Notable belongs to YPs everywhere: the educated, ambitious, progressive and socially savvy. Follow us on Facebook as we step-up our game once Timeline launches to keep you interested and informed in the who, what, where and when that you need to know.